State of the Field: Slavery

I would like to begin by offering some general observations on the state of scholarship on slavery, and then pose a few key questions that identify a number of issues we face.

Perhaps the greatest gain in the conceptualization of slavery has been the remarkable extension of both temporal and geographic boundaries, coupled, fortunately, with what we might term “micro” portraits and analyses of the immense differences between local regions. In 1956, when Kenneth Stampp’s revolutionary work overturned the racist tradition of a “benign” and paternalistic institution, he could still think of slavery as “peculiar,” and limit his focus to the antebellum South in an almost frozen period of time. Ironically, Ulrich Bonnell Phillips began his 1918 racist survey with chapters on “The Early Exploitation of Guinea,” “The Maritime Slave Trade,” and “The Sugar Islands .”

But thanks to David Eltis, Robin Blackburn, John Thornton, Robert Fogel, Stanley Engerman, David Richardson, George Fredrickson, Peter Kolchin, Winthrop Jordan, and many others, we now have a “Big Picture” view of a Transatlantic Slave System that began when Italian slave-trading merchants moved from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic islands close to the west African coast, and that ended only in 1888 with Brazil’s emancipation of all chattel slaves. Meanwhile, Philip Morgan, Ira Berlin, James Brooks, Leslie Harris, Joanne Melish, and numerous others have presented detailed studies of the complex diversity in the Chesapeake, South Carolina, Florida, the Northeastern colonies and states, and the Spanish Southwest, and in changing time periods of over 300 years.

Various authors have highlighted the non-economic functions of slavery, especially its connections with status and the desire for power. We have been forced to reconsider the supposed differences between ancient slavery and the forms it has taken in more modern times, as well as the differences between chattel servitude and convict labor, pawnship, serfdom, indentured servitude, and debt peonage.

Recent studies have also reexamined the history of racism and the way emerging racial consciousness helped to legitimate the enslavement of Africans and differentiate them from white indentured servants and even Native Americans. New works by Benjamin Isaac and David Goldenberg even challenge the conventional view that anti-black racism did not exist in the ancient world. As we learn more about the history of early Jewish, Muslim and Christian responses to sub-Saharan Africans and their use of the biblical Curse of Canaan (or Ham), we see Edmund Morgan’s story about the rise of racism in the Chesapeake in quite a different light.

Yet Ira Berlin has greatly enriched that narrative and has extended it forward in terms of distinct generations and economic demands. From Berlin and Philip Morgan we’ve learned that thanks to their numbers and the task system of labor, slaves in the colonial Carolina Lowcountry enjoyed greater autonomy and more social and familial stability, as well as a more African and less syncretic culture than their neighbors in the Chesapeake. Yet they were also forced to contend with much higher mortality, more brutal work, and less master-provided food and clothing than slaves in colonial Virginia and Maryland. I should add that Dylan Penningroth has transformed our understanding of slave families while also revealing wholly new facts about the counter-intuitive subject of slave property --- that is, property owned or claimed by slaves. And with respect to the meaning of property rights IN slaves, Walter Johnson, Ira Berlin, and others have dramatized the ghastly “internal slave trade,” that is, the liability of slaves to continuing sale, and the involuntary movement of perhaps a million black bondspeople from eastern regions to the Old Southwest.

As I turn to questions, one crucial issue which has been discussed by Robin Blackburn and David Eltis, but which still needs much more attention, is why Western Europeans, who were leaders in the development of political and economic freedom, including wage labor, were the creators and sustainers of the Atlantic Slave System. How could it be that eighteenth-century France, where as Sue Peabody has shown, lawyers quickly succeeded in winning freedom for many black slaves brought into the country, could be the site of Robert Harms’s slave ship, The Diligent, eagerly financed and supported by the citizens of a small seaport town, extremely jealous of the slave-trading wealth of neighboring Nantes? And what was the exact role and impact of Africans on the Atlantic Slave System?

A second major question is how to reconcile the immense success, productivity, and geographic expansion of racial slavery with any meaningful slave resistance? Beginning with Herbert Aptheker’s account of numerous slave conspiracies and Kenneth Stampp’s account of day-to-day resistance, historians have eagerly looked for more and more examples of revolts, escape, sabotage, work slow-downs, and much else. Similarly, when Frederick Douglass described the evils of slavery on his numerous lecture tours in the North, he was continually asked why the slaves didn’t rebel, as the white audiences assumed they would do in similar circumstances. Yet throughout the global history of slavery, there are records of few rebellions. While the American Revolution and the Civil War provided many thousands of slaves with the opportunity to flee and find freedom behind British or then Union lines, the wars evoked no major slave uprisings, as one might expect. There were no great revolts in the colonial Chesapeake, and the listing of Gabriel, Charles Deslondes (1811), and Nat Turner pretty much exhausts the number of actual armed uprisings in American national history. Even the reality of the major Denmark Vesey conspiracy has been seriously challenged by the historian Michael Johnson. And whatever one concludes about this debate, how on earth could an average of only two or so white males maintain order and manage a large and somewhat isolated slave plantation?

Eugene Genovese may have come closest to answering this question with his extremely complex and often misunderstood concept of “paternalism.” In recent years we have also heard much about slave-master negotiations, resistance expressed through forms of slave culture, and mechanisms to defuse discontent. But future students of slave resistance will still have to reconcile their theories with the fact that the system worked. It paid off. And Southern slavery was not about to self-destruct in 1860, except perhaps in the Southern political leaders’ unwise decision to secede from the federal Union .

I might add that the issue of resistance raises the even more controversial or even explosive issue of psychological and social damage. Since slave revolts were suicidal, as Frederick Douglass realized, the absence of armed rebellion can be a sign of rational common sense. On the other hand, an overemphasis on slave agency and an autonomous slave culture can cloak some of the worst evils of total domination, of all-out attempts to dehumanize humans and obliterate their dignity. It would surely be a mistake to return to the Stanley Elkins theory of slave infantilization. Yet the very words of Douglass and other former slaves testify to a kind of damage, probably temporary, inflicted by constant humiliation. We have not yet found a convincing balance that recognizes a degree of agency and self-protection while also taking account of the effects of many generations of tyrannical oppression.

Finally, various works written since the 1970s have underscored, in my opinion, the immense importance of contingency. There was no Whiggish force of progress that made the abolition of slavery inevitable. The twentieth century clearly witnessed more human beings being subjected to slavery or other forms of physically coerced labor than in any previous time. Even apart from the contingencies of the Civil War, or of slavery being legalized in Missouri but narrowly defeated a few years later in Illinois, what fate would the antislavery movement have had if it had first arisen in the era of Social Darwinism, scientific racism, and European imperialism? One gets the hint of an answer if one reads the article on “Negro” in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.